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Andrea Štaka, who won a Locarno Golden Leopard in 2006 with “Fraulein,” unveils her latest film “Mare” in the Panorama section of this year’s Berlin Festival.

Telling the story of a middle age mom, Marija Škaričić (“The Priest’s Children”) and Goran Navojec (“All the Best”) were cast to tell the story of a family in Dubrovnik.

Although Mare, her husband, and their three children live together in their home near the airport, she often feels like something is missing, and a stranger to those around her. When an outsider appears in her life, she will struggle to feel satisfied with what she has already.

Be For Films, the Belgium wing of France’s Playtime, handle sales on the co-production between Okofilm Productions and Dinaridi, co-produced by broadcaster Srf and Srg Ssr in Switzerland, Zdf in Germany and Arte in France. The film received financial backing from a host of public funds in various countries.

The Sarajevo Film Festival has unveiled the line-up for its 20th edition which runs August 15-23.

The 20th Sarajevo Film Festival (Aug 15-23) has announced its official selection. Among nine films in the feature competition, there are three world premieres, including the new film by Kosovo veteran Isa Qosja, Three Windows And A Hanging. Qosja won the Special Jury Award at Sff with Kukumi in 2005.

Two other world premieres in competition are first feature films: Georgian director Lasha Tskvitinidze’s I Am Beso, and Song Of My Mother by Turkey’s Erol Mintas.

The list of debuts in the competition is completed with Berlinale titles Brides by Georgia’s Tinatin Kajrishvili, Land Of Storms by Hungary’s Ádám Császi, and Macondo by Sudabeh Mortezai from Austria.

Cure - The Life Of Another, the new film by Andrea Staka who won Heart of Sarajevo for best film in 2006 with Das Fräulein, will have its...

My heartfelt thanks to Michael Hawley for sharing his preview of the current Sffs Screen lineup with Twitch.

* * * 2008 was a wildly ambitious year for the San Francisco Film Society (Sffs). In addition to presenting a stellar 51st Sf International Film Festival and launching two successful new mini-festivals—French Cinema Now and Québec Film Week—they also assumed stewardship of the 32-year-old Film Arts Foundation and its broad range of services for Bay Area filmmakers. And as if that wasn’t a plateful, they also jumped into the film exhibition business with the Sffs Screen at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.

Inaugurated last June as a venue for week-long runs of films with limited distribution, the Sffs Screen played host for three of my favorite films of 2008: Yang Li’s Blind Mountain, Andrea Staka’s Fraulein and Khuat Akhmetov’s Wind Man. I would have attended with greater frequency, but often...

LONDON -- A Swiss-German-Bosnian co-production, Das Fraulein, Andrea Staka's debut about the lives of two very different Yugoslav women living in Zurich, Switzerland, won the €25,000 Heart of Sarajevo award for best film Saturday as the 12th annual Sarajevo Film Festival came to a close. The film, judged by a jury headed by Jasmina Zbanic -- the young Bosnian filmmaker whose Grbavica won this year's Golden Bear at Berlin -- was lauded for the way in which the director combined "in an impressive way acting, editing and visual style," the jury said in a statement issued by festival organizers. A special €10,000 jury award went to another Bosnian debut director, Faruk Loncarevic. Jurors called the helmer's Mum 'N' Dad, a tale of an elderly couple played out against the background of a television reality show, a "truly original first film."...